"What happened?!"
Just then, Sengoku, who had been waiting in the shadows, arrived at the Port with Bartholomew Kuma, just as planned.
"Th-that's...!"
The two sudden arrivals sent the surrounding Marines into an uproar. Some were thrilled; others were terrified.
The thrilled ones had caught a rare glimpse of the elusive Fleet Admiral, the renowned Wise Strategist, Buddha Sengoku. Even as Headquarters soldiers, they hardly ever saw him wandering about. He was usually too busy feeding his Goat.
The terrified ones were staring at the figure beside Sengoku, a man even taller than Arudo: one of the current Shichibukai, Bartholomew Kuma the Tyrant!
One of the handful of Shichibukai on the seas!
One of the world's acknowledged powerhouses!
And since he had once been a pirate, his fearsome reputation only made him more frightening.
Before Kuma joined the Revolutionary Army, he had been nothing like the man he would later become.
He had earned the name "Tyrant" through countless deaths.
Kuma still held a book in his hands, but Loa could practically smell the suffocating stench of blood on him.
It wasn't a real smell. It was the sensation produced by the aura of a man who had killed far too many people.
For once, Loa's Dragon Body sounded a warning, telling him just how dangerous the giant before him was. It was more intense than anything he had felt even while fighting Zephyr.
The warning was strange, though. One moment it surged; the next, it vanished, only to surge again.
It was as though Kuma's strength were fluctuating.
Loa probed him briefly with Observation Haki, but found nothing. Kuma did give him a couple of extra glances. With that corpse-like face, though, Loa couldn't tell whether he was angry.
Is Kuma deciding whether to kill me? That was the